PvP Discussion: Automated Tournaments

This thread is to discuss the Automated Tournaments system. As a start, I’ll talk about what we’re working on for tournaments right now.

Swiss Style Tournaments
We’re changing the format of tournaments to Swiss. Swiss style tournaments will give teams more matches in the tournament. One loss doesn’t necessarily mean you’re done. After a number of Swiss rounds, we’ll cut to a Top X number of teams for a single elimination bracket. The finals will be changed to best 2 of 3. The number of Swiss rounds and the number involved in single elimination will be determined by the overall number of participants.

Tournament Capacity
We’re restructuring tournaments to greatly increase the number of teams that can be supported. While this isn’t terribly important with current tournament participation, we want to be ready for our next set of plans.

Special Tournaments
The tournament system was designed in a way that allows us to add one-off tournaments fairly easily. This means, we can do things like add 2v2 or Stronghold tournaments fairly easily. Once we’ve finished with Swiss and tournament capacity, we will start making use of this feature.

Honestly, I like everything here so I'm going to ask as well about the possibility of a spectate option or a link in game to gw2's twitch where they can broadcast the tourney and allow others to spectate without stress on the game engine.

All good ideas, I hope you also polish the UI since it's incredibly hard to see and is a bit messy imo, also agree with Ario if theres no general way to open it up for the public eyes to see the AT's I think having a gw2 twitchstream or whatever streaming it would be awesome

Swiss style tournaments sounds like a good idea. The one thing that might need to be adjusted if you move to swiss style is actually the rewards. If you have people spending significantly more time doing this event, as it sounds like would happen, you would have to bump up the rewards to compensate for this. One thing you did not mention in your post was about observing ATs. I understand that partners can do this, but is there plans to allow for viewing for all players? If you could go to the tournament tab and watch replays of the previous tournament it would be a welcome addition also. Thank you for the addition of another daily tournament as some people can now get in one a day, and others get two. One final question for monthly tournaments. This month the tournament is held on the 23rd, and I know it is scheduled for the 4th Saturday of every month. Many people will be with their family at that time. Is there going to be a way in the future to adjust this earlier/later in months around holidays so more people can participate (and adjust required QP if earlier)?

@Xuazinegueri.3592 said:
And what about a spectate mode? At least for the monthly, please! It could help a lot to learn about rotate since it is harder than learn to play just your class...

Spectating isn't open to everyone because of a technical limitation: we can only have so many players in a pvp match (including spectators). We opened up spectator for partners with the idea that they could stream themselves spectating tournaments, and everyone else could "spectate" by watching these streams.

@Vyrulisse.1246 said:
Any thought to having tournaments where random teams are formed from a pool of players queuing or is the population not there for that?

This probably isn't something that we will do as tournaments are designed to be a place for organized team play. While it could be a potential idea for a one-off special tournament, the tournament code currently doesn't support this functionality and it's unlikely that we would do a significant rework for a single tournament.

@bluri.2653 said:
All good ideas, I hope you also polish the UI since it's incredibly hard to see and is a bit messy imo, also agree with Ario if theres no general way to open it up for the public eyes to see the AT's I think having a gw2 twitchstream or whatever streaming it would be awesome

UI improvements are in the works, and some of them will be shipping with the swiss system. The biggest issue with having a gw2 stream is that someone would have to be manning the spectator camera which we probably can't support for every daily tournament, but maybe it's something that we could do a few times a week. I can look into it, but no promises.

@Vyrulisse.1246 said:
Any thought to having tournaments where random teams are formed from a pool of players queuing or is the population not there for that?

This probably isn't something that we will do as tournaments are designed to be a place for organized team play. While it could be a potential idea for a one-off special tournament, the tournament code currently doesn't support this functionality and it's unlikely that we would do a significant rework for a single tournament.

@bluri.2653 said:
All good ideas, I hope you also polish the UI since it's incredibly hard to see and is a bit messy imo, also agree with Ario if theres no general way to open it up for the public eyes to see the AT's I think having a gw2 twitchstream or whatever streaming it would be awesome

UI improvements are in the works, and some of them will be shipping with the swiss system. The biggest issue with having a gw2 stream is that someone would have to be manning the spectator camera which we probably can't support for every daily tournament, but maybe it's something that we could do a few times a week. I can look into it, but no promises.

I was mainly thinking the monthly tournament since it's where the rewards are at

@Salvo.8290 said:
Swiss style tournaments sounds like a good idea. The one thing that might need to be adjusted if you move to swiss style is actually the rewards. If you have people spending significantly more time doing this event, as it sounds like would happen, you would have to bump up the rewards to compensate for this.

This is a good point, and we're discussing increasing the per-match rewards when we move to the swiss system.

One thing you did not mention in your post was about observing ATs. I understand that partners can do this, but is there plans to allow for viewing for all players? If you could go to the tournament tab and watch replays of the previous tournament it would be a welcome addition also. Thank you for the addition of another daily tournament as some people can now get in one a day, and others get two.

I touched on this in a previous post, but we currently aren't planning to open tournament spectating to all players.

One final question for monthly tournaments. This month the tournament is held on the 23rd, and I know it is scheduled for the 4th Saturday of every month. Many people will be with their family at that time. Is there going to be a way in the future to adjust this earlier/later in months around holidays so more people can participate (and adjust required QP if earlier)?

This is something that is always going to be a problem in December. We currently don't have any plans to change the schedule for the monthlies.

@Salvo.8290 said:
Swiss style tournaments sounds like a good idea. The one thing that might need to be adjusted if you move to swiss style is actually the rewards.

One thing people don't often realize is that you get 30 silver for winning any PvP match ranked or unranked. 15 silver for losing. We've discussed trying to change this number for tournament play and making it a bit more visible. I think this would help a bit.

How far can you push the boundaries on this one? GW2 has several excellent PvP minigames/ activities such as Snowball Mayhem and Keg Brawl that have so much potential. In my opinion these would be a lot of fun and a nice change of pace for organized teams, but even after 5 years we can't play them with friends.

Would it be feasible to set up some Snowball Mayhem tournaments during the ~1 month Wintersday event?

@Cal Cohen.3527 said:
This is something that is always going to be a problem in December. We currently don't have any plans to change the schedule for the monthlies.

I was going to ask if monthly tournaments could be on a rotation for different days of the week, but I guess this answers to it. Too bad, I tend to work on Saturday so I won't be able to partecipate in them.

How far can you push the boundaries on this one? GW2 has several excellent PvP minigames/ activities such as Snowball Mayhem and Keg Brawl that have so much potential. In my opinion these would be a lot of fun and a nice change of pace for organized teams, but even after 5 years we can't play them with friends.

Would it be feasible to set up some Snowball Mayhem tournaments during the ~1 month Wintersday event?

We've definitely talked about setting up activity tournaments, but there's some work that needs to be done with the activities before they can be used in the tournament system. It's not a high priority at the moment, but it's possible somewhere down the line. Snowball Mayhem won't be tournament-ready for Wintersday this year.

If streaming the larger tournaments (i.e. monthly) through gw2 directly isn't something that is feasible consistently, how about updating parts of the loading screen UI or the PVP arena UI to encourage players to check for a stream on twitch?

Maybe somehow having partners register their twitch and then you guys check to see if any of the partners are streaming?

Great ideas, for the monthly finals maybe it would be nice to add a pause feature in case someone disconnects, 1 pause per team per map limited to maybe like 5 minutes or so, problem with a feature like this, is that maybe it gets abused and would require admins maybe to be present, which i'm not sure you can support.

@Scary.8034 said:
Great ideas, for the monthly finals maybe it would be nice to add a pause feature in case someone disconnects, 1 pause per team per map limited to maybe like 5 minutes or so, problem with a feature like this, is that maybe it gets abused and would require admins maybe to be present, which i'm not sure you can support.

This was actually investigated years ago, from what I've been told. Unfortunately, a lot of underlying systems would have to have pretty big changes to support it. It's something we're not likely to ever pursue.

Can we get the tournaments tab in looking for group broken out into 2 tabs like the raid looking for group tab is? One for looking for group, one for looking for more so we can form groups based on specs.

1) Those changes looks amazings!! More games per tournaments means more games, time and space for organized teamplay. Have you considered to increase the number of dailys AT? Because right now the only place where we can train in an organized team environment its AT.

2) Also to stream the monthly AT would be great so that we could have the chance to see pro players in act and to see how to rotate and git gud.

3) lock the team composition so that only one class per team is allowed. Class stacking can be really annoying and ruin the fun.

@Smarazzinger.1403 said:
1) Those changes looks amazings!! More games per tournaments means more games, time and space for organized teamplay. Have you considered to increase the number of dailys AT? Because right now the only place where we can train in an organized team environment its AT.

2) Also to stream the monthly AT would be great so that we could have the chance to see pro players in act and to see how to rotate and git gud.

3) lock the team composition so that only one class per team is allowed. Class stacking can be really annoying and ruin the fun.

@Smarazzinger.1403 said:
1) Those changes looks amazings!! More games per tournaments means more games, time and space for organized teamplay. Have you considered to increase the number of dailys AT? Because right now the only place where we can train in an organized team environment its AT.

2) Also to stream the monthly AT would be great so that we could have the chance to see pro players in act and to see how to rotate and git gud.

3) lock the team composition so that only one class per team is allowed. Class stacking can be really annoying and ruin the fun.

GG guys keep up the good work and sry for my bad grammar.

That's what I'm expecting from Tournaments in general. Let's push these a bit up to the roof, and let's use the visibility around them to lure new players.

@Smarazzinger.1403 said:
1) Those changes looks amazings!! More games per tournaments means more games, time and space for organized teamplay. Have you considered to increase the number of dailys AT? Because right now the only place where we can train in an organized team environment its AT.

We increased it to 4 not long ago. I'm not sure if we'll increase it again, since I think there's pretty good opportunities to participate at least several times per week for everyone at this point.

3) lock the team composition so that only one class per team is allowed. Class stacking can be really annoying and ruin the fun.

We've talked about this several times, and it's still something we could do. I'm a bit hesitant to pull the trigger, mainly because several classes have more than one role possibility. We could potentially restrict it by elite spec. It has become a bigger issue since PoF and bears more consideration.

@bluri.2653 said:
All good ideas, I hope you also polish the UI since it's incredibly hard to see and is a bit messy imo, also agree with Ario if theres no general way to open it up for the public eyes to see the AT's I think having a gw2 twitchstream or whatever streaming it would be awesome

UI improvements are in the works, and some of them will be shipping with the swiss system. The biggest issue with having a gw2 stream is that someone would have to be manning the spectator camera which we probably can't support for every daily tournament, but maybe it's something that we could do a few times a week. I can look into it, but no promises.

We would be really content with just the monthly tournaments being streamed. It would be very much appreciated and it would give players the opportunity to learn and analyze. Also by streaming the monthly AT's you could bring attention from new players interested in pvp modes in general. It's quite the intuitive step if you think about it. If one of your partners...say Sind...would stream the monthly AT then he wouldn't be able to play in it and that would be such a loss don't you think?

Love those ideas and if they come with proper tournamenttrees it’d be perfect!
Also please let us observe games, atleast with delays or after the game is over then there is literally no concern at all to be able to cheat.
Also the rewards in general should be increased. Maybe add ascended shards of glory as rewards and we should be able to do more with those shards. Maybe be able to unlock skins with that (like we were able to do with reward points from AT‘s in GW1) or buy black lion chest keys with those etc.

I‘d also recommend adding a proper tournmanetchat and not just a guild 5 chat which works as such, whenever you enter a tournament you should be able to /tournament and talk there to the people who are playing the tournament as well. Most people have 5 guilds and can’t see what other people right there.
Also we should be able to see more than just one player of a team who qued up. Maybe when we click on the name of the player who qued up we could also see the accountnames of his teammates? Idk why it should be a secret and it’s nice to be able to see who someone was with after the tournament is done as well. Like nobody knows who was in mat‘s finals and they don’t get recognized for getting there

@Smarazzinger.1403 said:
1) Those changes looks amazings!! More games per tournaments means more games, time and space for organized teamplay. Have you considered to increase the number of dailys AT? Because right now the only place where we can train in an organized team environment its AT.

We increased it to 4 not long ago. I'm not sure if we'll increase it again, since I think there's pretty good opportunities to participate at least several times per week for everyone at this point.

3) lock the team composition so that only one class per team is allowed. Class stacking can be really annoying and ruin the fun.

We've talked about this several times, and it's still something we could do. I'm a bit hesitant to pull the trigger, mainly because several classes have more than one role possibility. We could potentially restrict it by elite spec. It has become a bigger issue since PoF and bears more consideration.

3) lock the team composition so that only one class per team is allowed. Class stacking can be really annoying and ruin the fun.

We've talked about this several times, and it's still something we could do. I'm a bit hesitant to pull the trigger, mainly because several classes have more than one role possibility. We could potentially restrict it by elite spec. It has become a bigger issue since PoF and bears more consideration.

=

How about reviewing each Trait and Utilities Spells from all classes to have a ''Offensive or Defensive'' description under them ?
If a players have stacked too many Defensive Traits (dodge removes condition , or apply cripple , or offers protection) , or Evade Backwards/Defy Pain Utilities , then the system will ask the player to discard some of them and gain extra Rating / Loose Less .
(showcasing it as a Berseker-Turtle Bar on his UI while his w8s for his match to start)

3) lock the team composition so that only one class per team is allowed. Class stacking can be really annoying and ruin the fun.

We've talked about this several times, and it's still something we could do. I'm a bit hesitant to pull the trigger, mainly because several classes have more than one role possibility. We could potentially restrict it by elite spec. It has become a bigger issue since PoF and bears more consideration.

I would think it might be a worthwhile experiment specifically because there are two elite specs per profession now.

I'm not willing to go so far as to at some point having both teams choose a Spec to Ban, aka in the example Warrior has Core Warrior, Berserker and Spellbreaker to choose from bans... (Definitely something I've thought about).

But there are enough differences I believe between builds across Elite Specs that it would open up a different depth to tourney balance and how teams create comps, counters and so forth.

Instead of forcing a team to form a comp from 9 unique professions, we are asking them to form a comp from 27 unique trait builds. That's a lot more flexible.

At one time as I understand it, there was a tournament system in place where players could actually start a tournament. I'd like to suggest something like this be implemented again, where it launches once a required number of teams sign up, say. My primary reasoning is that the data seems to suggest a team queue would not work, but ATs currently aren't enough of an attraction to keep 5 man teams playing PvP. By introducing player-started ATs, you're creating a system where teams can be matched against other full teams without actually using the queue system.

I could see various options with rewards; from being purely given out by the tournament itself, to having teams have to pay an entree fee and basing rewards out of the prize pool generated by the entree fees. Even if there were no rewards at all, this would be an easier way for teams in the community to get in touch and get scrims happening etc. than the current completely word of mouth situation which seems to be stagnating heavily.

@bluri.2653 said:
All good ideas, I hope you also polish the UI since it's incredibly hard to see and is a bit messy imo, also agree with Ario if theres no general way to open it up for the public eyes to see the AT's I think having a gw2 twitchstream or whatever streaming it would be awesome

UI improvements are in the works, and some of them will be shipping with the swiss system. The biggest issue with having a gw2 stream is that someone would have to be manning the spectator camera which we probably can't support for every daily tournament, but maybe it's something that we could do a few times a week. I can look into it, but no promises.

I don't think it's absolutely necessary to have someone man the camera, even a "dumb" script that rotates on a fixed interval would be better than nothing. There are also numerous possibilities with the Twitch API and integrating a mechanism for camera control into the chat.

@Smarazzinger.1403 said:
Have you considered to increase the number of dailys AT? Because right now the only place where we can train in an organized team environment its AT.

We increased it to 4 not long ago. I'm not sure if we'll increase it again, since I think there's pretty good opportunities to participate at least several times per week for everyone at this point.

It's not working. It's too much of a pain in the butt to remember what time a tournament is each day. Then you have to get 4 friends to remember. And all for a handful of games, most of which are blow-outs one way or the other. The swiss-style changes won't address that problem.
Recommend changing to every 2-3 hours, fixing at least 2 during prime time for that region, or just allowing groups in ranked again.

I like the change to a Swiss style Bracket. One of the biggest problems of the AT's has been the idea of matching the top team vs the bottom team in a bid to be "competitive." That's well and good for the top team. Still, people will only deal with playing a losing game for a short time before moving on and that's what we're seeing happening.

I note that the winner of a "true" Swiss bracket might be determined before the end of the set. Perhaps that's why you've chosen to flip systems mid tournament. I propose that a better idea would be to go with the true Swiss bracket.

The teams don't know the scores of the other teams anyway. So, it doesn't matter if the winner is determined before the final round. Flipping brackets mid stream opens up all sorts of potential technical problems and even perhaps unfairness to some teams, under some circumstances.

Can timers on these tournaments possibly be a little better? It's hard to set proper team together for these tournaments if the times are always changing for each day and it makes it hard for most teams to get on the same time/day for them.

3 -4 times a day for these tournaments with actual time set for them so more organized teams can join together?

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:
This thread is to discuss the Automated Tournaments system. As a start, I’ll talk about what we’re working on for tournaments right now.

Swiss Style Tournaments
We’re changing the format of tournaments to Swiss. Swiss style tournaments will give teams more matches in the tournament. One loss doesn’t necessarily mean you’re done. After a number of Swiss rounds, we’ll cut to a Top X number of teams for a single elimination bracket. The finals will be changed to best 2 of 3. The number of Swiss rounds and the number involved in single elimination will be determined by the overall number of participants.

Actually Swiss Rounds are a really Good, even the best idea. It gives the community the chance to play more games and improve probably their teamplay, giving a chance to build new teams.
The main problem is to see how long it will take to complete the tournament, and what kind of Swiss system you're planning to put, and whats the % of teams qualified in the final bracket (is it top 2 for 8 players, 4 for 16, 8 for 32)? Then it will determine how long it is, because with 32 players there will be 5 games + 3 more for the best team (8 games and it means more than 2h) can be too long for some players.

Then Which swiss system will you use to calculate the goal average to determinate the teams who will go to the Top X in case of draw?

Other thing that lacks the game from the beginning, is the visibility of the events. Just to put on the right corner of the game, an announcement and even by clicking on a link to the broadcast. It should have been done years ago, with the other tournaments : Proleagues, Challengers, and other tournaments. That's a thing that would have brang more participants anyway.

And last thing is, even if there were given some answers, we need a spectate mode or to create something to spectate the games. Im not talking about streamers that does it actually, but a way to spectate games , at least the finals

I can't talk about torunaments much, never managed to find one active when i have the time for pvp, and most of my regular pvp team mates left when you removed ranked teams.
So that's one issue.

I think in all modes, but this bears more consideration in tournaments. There should be better readability of what's on the other team. Show us the enemy team's Elite specs and Runes/amulets, so people can do counter picks.
For it do be done properly you'd have to revamp the whole thing and allow draft picks. But you can achieve some sort of middle ground through allowing players to see who's what in the other team, and allow one switch per team, per round, and auto-lock them after they relog once. Or something like that.

I don't suppose you guys could sprinkle in more Automated Tournaments during Spvp's prime time throughout the week and on weekends. Like when the maximum amount of people are playing Spvp, so we don't need to wait five hours between tourneys.

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:
This thread is to discuss the Automated Tournaments system. As a start, I’ll talk about what we’re working on for tournaments right now.

Swiss Style Tournaments
We’re changing the format of tournaments to Swiss. Swiss style tournaments will give teams more matches in the tournament. One loss doesn’t necessarily mean you’re done. After a number of Swiss rounds, we’ll cut to a Top X number of teams for a single elimination bracket. The finals will be changed to best 2 of 3. The number of Swiss rounds and the number involved in single elimination will be determined by the overall number of participants.

Tournament Capacity
We’re restructuring tournaments to greatly increase the number of teams that can be supported. While this isn’t terribly important with current tournament participation, we want to be ready for our next set of plans.

Special Tournaments
The tournament system was designed in a way that allows us to add one-off tournaments fairly easily. This means, we can do things like add 2v2 or Stronghold tournaments fairly easily. Once we’ve finished with Swiss and tournament capacity, we will start making use of this feature.

Looks great. Has there been any thought to allowing tourney matches to count towards players ratings?

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:
This thread is to discuss the Automated Tournaments system. As a start, I’ll talk about what we’re working on for tournaments right now.

Swiss Style Tournaments
We’re changing the format of tournaments to Swiss. Swiss style tournaments will give teams more matches in the tournament. One loss doesn’t necessarily mean you’re done. After a number of Swiss rounds, we’ll cut to a Top X number of teams for a single elimination bracket. The finals will be changed to best 2 of 3. The number of Swiss rounds and the number involved in single elimination will be determined by the overall number of participants.

Actually Swiss Rounds are a really Good, even the best idea. It gives the community the chance to play more games and improve probably their teamplay, giving a chance to build new teams.
The main problem is to see how long it will take to complete the tournament, and what kind of Swiss system you're planning to put, and whats the % of teams qualified in the final bracket (is it top 2 for 8 players, 4 for 16, 8 for 32)? Then it will determine how long it is, because with 32 players there will be 5 games + 3 more for the best team (8 games and it means more than 2h) can be too long for some players.

Then Which swiss system will you use to calculate the goal average to determinate the teams who will go to the Top X in case of draw?

Other thing that lacks the game from the beginning, is the visibility of the events. Just to put on the right corner of the game, an announcement and even by clicking on a link to the broadcast. It should have been done years ago, with the other tournaments : Proleagues, Challengers, and other tournaments. That's a thing that would have brang more participants anyway.

And last thing is, even if there were given some answers, we need a spectate mode or to create something to spectate the games. Im not talking about streamers that does it actually, but a way to spectate games , at least the finals

I disagree, how can it be too long if it's only once a month dedication? cmon lol.